Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga

Episode 8

After last week's touching and witty episode, this week's Blue Exorcist does…. everything required of it. Here's the carnage of the Blue Night, with Satan's frenzied search for a new body engulfing all sides of the show's world, followed by more fighting with his monster child that leads to Rin's demon heart being sealed away.

It's all as well done and as exciting as a prequel story where we know the outcome can be. It misses the emotional lightness, the inherent uplift, of the previous episode, but it would be mean to slate it on that basis. In particular, it's impressive how the fighting between Shiro and baby-Rin can be goofy at times (baby-Rin in the magic flood: “bububububble!”) but the fight still feels big, even awesome, enough to justify the bombastic music accompanying it. To see how that balance can go painfully wrong, watch some twenty-first century Doctor Who.

I also found myself reflecting on how interesting this season is turning out as an exercise in showing a backstory at such length. Long before Phantom Menace turned prequels into blockbuster concerns, serial anime were routinely highlighting how we had come into a story halfway through, with elaborate flashback episodes showing how the story really began decades before. (My first experience of such an anime was the "How I Destroyed My Civilization” episode of Hideaki Anno's Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water.)

Of course, the main reason it works here is because the story of Shiro, Yuri, and Satan is interesting enough to be told at length. It also works because of the ultra-personal stakes that Rin has in the backstory – we see you lurking behind the others in the frame, young man! Surely he'll make some intervention in the past events, however small or futile, before the season is through.

The episode starts with a meeting between Lucifer and the maddened Satan, both with demonic skull faces and puppet-like mouths. Watch it with the sound down and it's ridiculous, fodder for a comedy meme. Yet the voices and music give the scene a Lovecraftian grandeur.

That's followed by the multiple mini-payoffs involving characters from across the show. The glimpsed fate of Igor Neuhaus (from the first season) and his family is almost an ellipsis. There's more on the destruction wrought on the Kyoto Exorcists, including the last stand of Takezo Shima, flinging his infant brother Renzo to safety. Have we just been handed the key to Renzo's nebulous psyche in the present day? Then we glimpse Shiemi's pregnant mum in that sinister Eden from last week, only mysteriously she's named Shiemi too.

I'm fascinated by Mephisto Pheles, and the ongoing suggestion he's what Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan or Attack on Titan's Eren only struggled to be – a being who sees past, present and future as one, operating along their continuum with slick assurance, showing present-day Rin exactly how he saved Rin's baby self even as he does so.

Then there's the birth of Yukio. It's rare to see an anime so unsparing about the ordeal of childbirth, with poor Yuri (yes, she's still alive) put through the wringer again. That's followed by the infant's examination by the Exorcists, in what feels terribly like the ducking-stool tests given “witches” in past centuries. As I've said before, this season has a forthright idea of what's truly evil, more than any horned baby or pitifully possessive Satan.

Finally, love Shiro's gun-and-magic sword combo pose, cool and ludicrous like so much good anime. Of course, it's balanced out by a quintessential Shiro-is-a-dick moment. He responds to Yuri's pleas to just go away with a childish pout, just as we think he might take the high road. Sometimes nothing separates Shiro from Satan.

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